10 Things Your Lawyer Won't Tell You

Ask an attorney about anything outside his niche, and odds are he won’t know much. Teacher Marie Karim learned that when she decided to sue the New York City hospital where she had developed an infection and a hernia during exploratory surgery in 1999. Karim hired Sheri B. Paige because her mother had once consulted the Norwalk, Conn., lawyer about collecting a debt. Karim says Paige assured her that she had experience with medical malpractice cases.

More than a year later, Karim says she discovered that Paige had virtually no such experience and that she hadn’t even filed the suit. Worse yet, the statute of limitations had run out. “I wanted to kill her,” says Karim, who got $325,000 from Paige’s insurance company in 2002 with assistance from a specialist in legal malpractice. Paige denies all wrongdoing and blames the entire mess on Karim. But in November 2002, a Connecticut lawyer grievance panel found probable cause to believe that Paige was guilty of misconduct, and she was disbarred in 2005.

Moral of the story: Karim should have hired an expert in the area of law she needed—someone who does almost nothing but medical malpractice. You can find specialists in the lawyer directory Martindale-Hubbell, available in any library or online at www.martindale.com, or at the FindLaw web site.